Oct. 28, 2009 (PR Newswire) --

BOSTON, Oct. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Communispace, creator of online customer insight and innovation communities for some of the world's leading brands, and its client Scholastic Book Clubs were awarded a 2009 Forrester Groundswell Award in the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Embracing category. The Forrester Groundswell Awards recognize excellence in achieving business and organization goals with social technology applications. In this collaboration, Communispace and Scholastic Book Clubs created a private customer community to help make the popular Scholastic Book Clubs flyers even better. This community, consisting of 200 teachers and 100 parents of children in grades K-6, helped Scholastic understand how the two groups think about book selection, which elements they find to be the most important and how they match children with the right books. The insights and ideas given directly by customers to Scholastic allowed the company to be confident and quick in making carefully-considered adjustments to its presentation in the Book Club flyer.

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The co-creation project, utilizing a proprietary methodology developed by Communispace and conducted over a 10-week period, allowed Scholastic Book Clubs editors and designers to work directly with community members through a four-step process of exploration, ideation, prototype development and testing and, ultimately, production. By bringing parents and educators together at the very beginning of the project, Communispace and Scholastic Book Clubs created a collaborative environment where informed ideation resulted in actionable insights.

For example, Scholastic Book Clubs learned that, while parents and teachers share a desire to match children with age-appropriate books they love to read, each group differs in how they help children choose the right book. So while teachers view reading level as the "most important" factor when selecting a book; parents prefer to flip through the pages to get a feel for the subject matter; and children want books that are similar to something they've enjoyed in the past. As a result, Scholastic Book Clubs made changes to its flyers to organize the books by reading level, in an open face layout showing a sample page from a book at each level, and with a recommendation section for books with a similar subject matter.

"For more than 60 years, Scholastic Book Clubs has worked with parents and teachers to help children learn to love to read," said Judy Newman, president of Scholastic Book Clubs.